Alain Resnais’s “You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet”

Strange that, in the span of a week, two movies are opening in which well-known actors perform under their own name as some version of themselves, albeit in a fictional framework. The more publicized one is “This Is the End,” opening next Wednesday. The other opens today: the nonagenarian Alain Resnais’s latest film, “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet” (which I reviewed when it played at last year’s New York Film Festival). It in, thirteen of France’s most celebrated actors—including Mathieu Amalric, Pierre Arditi, Anne Consigny, Anny Duperey, Michel Piccoli, Lambert Wilson, and Sabine Azéma (who is also the director’s wife)—play themselves in a scenario where they are summoned by phone to the funeral of a friend, the (fictitious) playwright Antoine d’Anthac, which is being held at his villa in the mountainside village of Peillon.

There, the majordomo (Andrzej Seweryn) seats the guests together in the playwright’s grand salon to satisfy his last request: that they watch a video, hosted by the playwright himself (played by the splendid comic actor Denis Podalydès), in which a young theatre company performs one of his celebrated plays, “Eurydice,” in which all of the assembled actors had, over the years, performed onstage. But as the performance unfolds on the video (featuring the real-life Compagnie de la Colombe and directed not by Resnais but by the filmmaker Bruno Podalydès), the actors who are watching begin to speak the lines along with the recording. Soon, the villa’s spaces are transformed—by means of Resnais’s digital prestidigitation—into a stage in which the play is spontaneously reprised by its primordial interpreters, who revive their own lives’ memories and passions as they act.

A couple of days ago, in response to the Guardian’s list of movie-land’s top five time machines, I tweeted a link to my own favorite: the potato-like pod from Resnais’s 1968 science-fiction melodrama “Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime” (scroll down). But the greatest cinematic time machine of all is the camera, which shows us today what was filmed yesterday or a century ago, and no director has made more self-conscious or intricate use of the cinema’s built-in time shift than Resnais. His first feature, “Hiroshima, Mon Amour,” is constructed around the personal and political past of two lovers—a French woman and a Japanese man. His second, “Last Year at Marienbad,” has time and memory built into its title and, even as it layers memory, forgetting, and ambiguity into its elusive drama, it summons another, unseen past: the run-up to the Second World War. His documentary “Night and Fog,” from 1955, is a crucial documentary about the Nazi concentration camps, based on the contrast between their vestiges as filmed anew and archival images. His 1997 musical “The Same Old Song,” which is set in contemporary Paris, opens with a Nazi flag and uses popular music to evoke the distant past and superseded states of mind.

The title of “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet” has its crucial themes—bravura performance, gaps in time, and the invisible—built into it (after all, the story of Orpheus and Eurydice turns on an injunction against seeing). Resnais’s films have always featured an incantatory style of performance, a level of theatrical artifice to match the conspicuous artifice of his disjointed sense of cinematic time. For Resnais, what’s most interesting about the people he films is precisely what the camera can’t show: what’s going on in their minds. He relies on elaborate texts, meticulous acting, highly confected camera work, and, in this movie, joltingly simple but conspicuous digital effects to evoke the furious whirl of inner life that raises a silent racket behind even the most placid or controlled of expressions.

In this film, the loudest racket is comes from the spectre of death. The actors on hand aren’t in the first flush of youth; they’re brought together on the occasion of death. The roles that they play in “Eurydice” are themselves death-haunted, and the contrast of their current ages with those of the young performers in the video calls attention to the generation gap even as it brings them into sudden inner proximity with their own former selves.

With a foot seemingly in the beyond (though by all accounts, Resnais is well and busy—he’s finishing work on his new film, “Aimer, Boire et Chanter”— based on Alan Ayckbourn’s play “Life of Riley”), the director calls upon increasingly audacious visual devices to evoke it. He’s an instantaneous master of the digital realm that he has only now essayed, but the underlying notion of the virtual has been latent in his work from the start, as he suggested here, in an interview with Nicole Zand, from 1961:

The world is real for all, different for each, is more or less what Proust said. That’s what makes communication between beings difficult. At every moment, the imagination puts them on a different wavelength… .

We refuse to limit reality to the purely objective account of a scientifically analyzable world. We think that reality is vaster, which makes communication all the more difficult. One can imagine a world where everything would happen at the same time, a mentality of bees in a certain way, which would make for a perpetual communication of all brains.

There are screens in “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet” that are split in two and in four, conversations between the video screen and the physical world, transformations of space from the barren interior of an underdecorated salon to a theatrical train station to the enchanted blue wood of the shadow realm. Resnais, who was born in the era of silent film, captures the sense of the virtual, of a world of interconnected minds and divided consciousness, with great vigor. Communication across the room or even across the planet is a breeze compared with communication to Orpheus and Eurydice in the underworld.